John Ortberg Quotes

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.

God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure - people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character.

In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.

The Holy Spirit will lead you to be with people as Jesus would be with them if He were in your place.

A boss who interrupts an employee a lot is called an extrovert, whereas an employee who interrupts a boss too often is called an ex-employee.

A bad sermon is like a car wreck - everyone slows down to see what happened.

I'm more concerned about who you're becoming than what you're doing.

The reason our souls hunger so is that the life we could be living so far exceeds our strangest dreams.

Real question is not who was this man (Jesus), but who is this man?

Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.

The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience.

One reason why we fail to hear God speak is that we are not attentive. We suffer from what might be called 'spiritual mindlessness.'

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

The miracle of Sunday is that a dead man lives. The miracle of Saturday is that the eternal Son of God lies dead.

Passion for our work is not usually a subterranean volcano waiting to erupt...It is a muscle that gets strengthened a little each day as we show up - as we do what is expected of us, and then some.

The Holy Spirit says: You are it. You are God's plan. In a thirsty world, people need to be refreshed. It is a broken world, and people need to be healed. Now get out there and do it!

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.

God is so immense that if he were 'too visible, ' people would give forced compliance without expressing their heart. So God made it possible, in enormous love, for us to live as if he were not there.

The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is also learning to hear God speak through them.

What makes a man's 80 year-old Irish uncle skip like a little boy? "Me Father is very fond of me!

True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness.

If I think God’s aim is to produce rule-followers, spiritual growth will always be an obligation rather than a desire of my heart.

We complicate our faith and lives in many ways, but at the core, our purpose is simple: We are called to love.

Christianity is like a nail, " he (Yemelian Yaroslavsky). "The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.

...sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way.

...all of us are somewhere on a journey to God, and the gap between least and most advanced is infinitely smaller than the gap between the most advanced and God himself.

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our 'appropriate smallness.

No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith." Elie Wiesel

Researchers have found there is simply no correlation between hurry or Type-A behavior and productivity.

A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today.

People nowadays take time far more seriously than eternity. – Thomas Kelly

We are not the passive victim of others' opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.

The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.

At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.

Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.

'Amusement' is appealing because we don't have to think it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.

Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.

Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'